"I have spent the last few weeks addressing and preparing for a military invasion by the President of the United States. No, I’m not a soldier or a foreign adversary. I’m the Governor of Illinois"

The offer made to women in the enticement to become trad wives is the same as the offer made to citizens in the enticement to embrace authoritarianism: give up. Abandon the aspiration to self rule. It’s imprisonment recast as rest and relief.

People who could use a little Wellbutrin vs. people saying the 14 words, basically.

i think one thing people have a hard time grasping is that the central figures of the trump administration are not bad as in "the worst republican blowhard you know," but bad as in "the worst people you have ever heard of." donald trump is a serial rapist whose best friend was a pedophile.

One thing I am realizing about this administration-- not just Trump, but his underlings-- is that they all think running the country is functionally the same as being able to have everything they want, all at once, immediately. There is no strategy, just naked expectation of instant gratification.

producing successes is great. really important, success. you know what's even more important? surviving failure. because no matter how good you are, eventually failure comes knocking. and if you can't survive it, that's that.

...once again, one of the easier ways to turn up the virality on your post is to go from "[popular thing] is true" to "no one wants to admit it but [popular thing] is true"

ah. bluesky.

for all people mock it wikipedia is genuinely one of the wonders of the modern world

today in ttrpgs: probably my biggest design hack, as a gm, was to change my mindframe from "how do i restrain player power" to "how do i give the players power" "wait samantha aren't ttrpgs all power fantasies" yes but in a totally incoherent way let me explain

In Naperville, IL on Wednesday, ICE surrounded a group of documented workers replacing a residential roof. ICE agents reportedly kicked over the ladders and forced the workers to jump. The episode involved a chase with guns drawn.

Social media is the sea peoples

you know you're writing about Gender when you type out the sentence "under patriarchy, do men have the privilege to be pretty little femboys?" with a totally straight face

Charlie Kirk Sept 27 2024: "Just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night - it's only gonna get worse - unless Donald Trump wins There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama and they will become your masters"

Way back before the Trump era, I was arguing that liberals needed to take more seriously the capacity for civil society to act autonomously and oppositionally, because that's not the sort of thing you can just quickly call into being when the government is the bad guy. academic.oup.com/book/2889

Even as we here on Bluesky have a (very useful) anti-defeatist attitude, we are mostly missing a shared belief, instinct really, that all people inherently desire liberty and disdain tyranny. Which you know, is an attitude current events have not been kind to. And we're all a bunch of neurotics.

Fascism has been very rough on me in all the expected ways. But the most unexpected way is that more and more I find myself thinking explicitly and unironically in terms of Platonic ideals like Truth and Justice and Goodness. Not where I thought I'd be in the year 2025

One thing that remains fascinating to me is how much radical Trumpism wants to move down the value chain, instead of upwards to more value-add + complex production and research. Instead, RFK kills the NIH and NSF.

Right after the war in Ukraine broke out I read an amazing thread on the Other Place on how authoritarianism is incompatible with knowledge industries. The more valuable the industry, the closer to the inner circle the crony assigned to it must be

We're +570%.

Dear gestapo trash:

the difference between me and guys like klein is that he thinks we should study the right to learn their values and i think we should study the right to learn their tactics

again, again, again, again: autocrats like to declare themselves untouchable and all-powerful. sometimes they even write it into law. and yet that does not make it so

okay. sometimes bluesky is worth it.

btw the part of this I think this website in particular struggles with is that sometimes you need to let the moderate-viber cook without providing you constant vibe reassurance and have enough trust that they’re not going to sell you out on the policy.

Unfortunately we don't get to pick whether we're in a fight or not

"Neither Trump nor the MAGA right wants to discuss or deliberate; it wants to dominate. American politics is no longer a fight over policy; it is a fight... [to defend] a more democratic and egalitarian American republic — not hope that one can avoid the fight by having the right conversation."

yeah I think this is a good metaphor for the tension between people who do longer term activism and the more normie types who join in moments of unrest and momentum like the present. warriors who regard the conflict as a part of their identity, vs. soldiers who want to win and fucking go home.

democrats must embrace war mindset

The experience of every center-left and center-right party across Europe for the past 15 years has proven that trying to be a more moderate and reasonable version of the far right just drives voters to the real thing.

no more Magic Grampas

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

"Ezra Klein, Charlie Kirk, Free Speech, and Whitewashing in the Media": @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social and @trentrichardnelson.bsky.social with @marisakabas.bsky.social, on our Half the Answer podcast www.liberalcurrents.com/half-the-ans...

As someone who has followed this discourse closely, this has been a thing for time out of mind. Centirst pundits are always urging Dems to sell out on abortion when it's their *most* popular culture war issue, and it makes even less sense given the public opinion shift post-Dobbs

today in ttrpgs: i gave my players an awesome pet cat (jaguar) friend who is redoubtable and loves scritches. probably the cruelest thing i've ever done as a gm

Things were better when computer was in room. Now everywhere is computer. This is bad. Computer should never have escaped room.

talked about this on the latest neonliberalism, but one of the distinctive features of the centerless centrists is that they try to triangulate not by paying attention to what conservatives actually want, but by what they imagine the median voter in their head wants.... ...with predictable results.

the whole abundance thing has made it clear to me that ezra is an interesting policy thinker but is absolutely not a political thinker. this isn't bad necessarily, political strategy is not his lane. but it becomes a problem when people take his political advice

the best way to protest is to festoon yourselves with as much super alienating imagery as possible. flags people can’t decipher but seem vaguely menacing. placards that make impossible demands with implied threats. be creative. your goal is to annoy a wide, WIDE swathe. this is praxis. read theory.

Like, in terms of possibilities which will look inevitable in hindsight, the range is from Nothing Ever Happens to McGotterdammerung.

ppl who say we're cooked or nothing matters or that we won't have future elections or that what's happening now will be what happens forevermore are not only telling you they have basically no historical knowledge but also that they can't distinguish "the end of my world" from "the end of the world"

a lot of the lore of my game design is based on the modern mythos genre, and thus much of the quabbles about ethics/race in dnd are totally bizarre to me. why would you even need for there to be some "always okay to kill" group and how could this possibly be settled biologically?

it does not actually make your position look better when you have to resort to ten layers of metadiscussion about epistemic authority instead of arguing the substantive issue on the merits

HARDEST PHOTO OF 2025 JUST DROPPED

that's why you bring the US flag to protests, folks

here's a direct link to canceling your Disney+ account. post your cancellations in the comments. www.disneyplus.com/commerce/acc...

"Right now, Beijing is offering cheap, clean power, employment, trade and a route to prosperity. Washington is offering tariffs, policy chaos, White nationalist memes and South Korean workers in shackles after a raid on an EV battery factory." www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

fascism in the post-mass politics era. democracy in the post-mass politics era. leftism in the post-mass politics era. Everybody doing the cargo cults. Symbols with no backing. Fun stuff.